Saturday, March 12, 2011

Pre-production for Khumba has been going surprisingly smoothly the last few months. Dan and Matt are doing a brilliant job and have already designed all the characters and most of the environments; we are already finishing up the second pass of the rough animatic; and Jacquie has been compiling everything together into an animation bible with the help of some great character poses by Jac.

Plus, we have finally attached a polish writer to give the screenplay a final (and American) once-over. More on this to follow once it is all 100% official, but it's exciting to say the least...

Yesterday the screening of the first Act went well which was a relief after the confusion of the first screening - zebras can really all look the same in 2d! Big up to the storyboarding team: Ric, Remi and Lorraine who are helping to bring pictures to the words.

As seen here, we got the go-ahead for cinemascope which is great because the Karoo really needs to be seen in widescreen!

The last few months have helped me see what is and what isn't working and allowed us time to work out the most efficient process - including a simpler numbering system (so that we don't need 3 different numbers as seen above). Soon we go into the next pass of the animatic with the final, polished script - gotta get it all ready before the rest of the team start... shew.

One interesting issue came up with the animatic - can we show a dead mother? I really wanted to show that Khumba's mother is no longer a "character" but just an "animal" when she dies, but the particular poses and shots might be a bit disturbing for children, so I might have to tone it down a bit - even though Lion King didn't shy away much:

I don't know, maybe a dead mother on screen is much more traumatic than a dead father for kids?

Sunday, March 6, 2011

After capturing the lighthouse image in the previous blog post, I realised that earlier today I had put aside this image which I wanted to use as a cloud reference. I took the pic in Sydney - the clouds really were like this - no Photoshop work.

Going through more photos I found these others too - it seems there is a subconscious trend in my photography.